[00:00] Introduction
Nobody prepares you for motherhood. Not really. You can read every book, take every class, talk to every friend who has already done it, and still, when it actually happens, you discover that nothing quite captured it. The love is bigger than you expected. The exhaustion is bigger than you expected. And the guilt, the constant, low-level hum of wondering whether you are doing enough, whether you are present enough, whether you are giving them what they need while also trying to hold onto the parts of yourself that exist outside of being their mother, that is bigger than you expected too.
I have two children and I built this business around them. Not after them, around them. I did not wait until they were older, or until things were easier, or until I felt ready. I built in the gaps, in the early mornings, in the evenings, in the school hours. And I want to talk honestly about what that has actually been like, not to make it sound heroic, because it is not heroic, it is just real life, but because I know there are mothers listening to this episode who are wondering whether it is possible to do both. I want to tell you what I genuinely know.
I didn’t wait until the children were older. I built around them. Not because it was easy, because the waiting felt like a kind of disappearing.
[02:30] What Your Children Actually Need from You
The conversations about motherhood in entrepreneurship almost always focus on logistics, the childcare, the school runs, the balance of hours. But I want to start somewhere different, which is with what our children actually need from us before anything else. Because when I got clear on this, the guilt started to shift.
What my children need from me, what I believe all children need, is to know that they are loved unconditionally, and to be shown by example that life is worth engaging with fully. They need to see that adults pursue things that matter to them. They need to understand that the world is not always easy but that it is navigable. They need the basic things: food, safety, presence, someone who is genuinely interested in them as people. What they do not need is a mother who gave up everything she wanted to be in order to be available at every moment, and who carries the weight of that sacrifice in a way that children feel even when it is never spoken out loud.
I say this carefully, because I know how it can sound. I am not dismissing the importance of being present. Presence matters enormously. But presence and self-sacrifice are not the same thing, and I think we have sometimes conflated them in ways that are damaging to mothers and, ultimately, to children.
[08:00] Building Yourself While You Are Raising Them
The version of building a business that most people imagine, long uninterrupted hours, constant availability, the freedom to go to every event and take every opportunity, is not the version available to most mothers, and certainly was not the version available to me. What I had instead was time in fragments. And I learned, slowly, that fragments add up to something.
I started working in what I now call energy blocks, defined periods, usually around three hours, where I had focus and capacity. Not every day had one. Some weeks were entirely given over to family and I accepted that without fighting it. But when I had a block, I protected it fiercely. I treated it like a professional appointment with a client. I did not scroll into it. I did not arrive at it with a half-empty mind and a full inbox. I prepared for it and I used it. Over time, those blocks built my consultancy, piece by piece. They built the framework I use with clients. They built my writing, including my book, Unstuck for Entrepreneurs. They built the relationships that have become the backbone of my professional network.
The other thing I did was stop pretending I could do everything alone. Getting help is not a weakness and it is not a luxury. It is a strategy. Whether that is childcare, a virtual assistant, a business mentor, a friend who swaps school pick-ups with you, finding the support that allows you to function is part of building. It is not separate from it.
A three-hour block, used with full focus, is worth more than an eight-hour day where you are half elsewhere. I built most of this business in those three hours.
[14:00] The Regret I Refuse to Have
I worked with a woman once, brilliant, experienced, with a product idea that was genuinely original, who told me she was going to wait until her children were in secondary school before she started her business properly. Her youngest was four. She was going to wait ten years. And I understood the impulse completely, because I have felt it myself, the idea that there will be a cleaner moment, a simpler season, when the stars align and the timing is right.
But here is what I know after twenty years of working with founders, and after raising my own children while building my own business: there is no clean moment. The children get older and there are new demands, exams, social complexity, the emotional intensity of teenagers who need you in completely different ways from the four-year-old who needed you physically. The financial pressures shift but do not disappear. Life does not clear a runway for you. You have to build the runway while the plane is already moving.
The regret I cannot live with is the regret of not trying. Not the regret of failing, I have failed at things and recovered, and none of those failures destroyed me. But the regret of looking back at a period of your life and knowing that you had something in you that you did not give a chance, that is the one I refuse to carry. And I refuse to carry it on behalf of my children, because I do not believe that watching their mother live a smaller life than she was capable of is a gift to them.
[18:00] What My Children Have Taught Me About Business
This is the part I did not expect. My children have made me a better entrepreneur. Not in spite of the demands they make on my time, but because of them. They have taught me to be decisive, when you have limited time you cannot afford to sit in indecision for very long. They have taught me that most problems are less catastrophic than they feel in the moment. They have taught me about resilience in a completely untheoretical way, because children fall and get up constantly and they do not make it mean anything profound about themselves. They just get up.
They have also shown me what really matters. There were times in my business when I was chasing something that felt urgent, a client, a deal, a press opportunity, and one of my children said or did something that made me suddenly see it clearly: this, right here, is what the business is for. Not the deal. Not the press mention. The life that the business makes possible. When I forgot that, I lost my way. When I remembered it, I made better decisions.
My children didn’t slow my business down. They clarified it. They reminded me constantly what I was actually building towards.
[23:00] What I Would Tell My Younger Self
I would tell her to stop waiting for permission. I would tell her that the guilt is real but it is not accurate information, you are allowed to want things for yourself and still be a devoted mother. I would tell her to find her people earlier, to stop trying to do everything alone out of a misplaced sense of self-sufficiency. I would tell her that the business she is afraid to start will not destroy her family. In some of the ways that matter most, it will strengthen it.
And I would tell her that her children are watching. Not in a way that should add more pressure, but in a way that should add more permission. They are watching to see what is possible. What they see you do becomes part of their understanding of what life can look like. Let them see someone who tried.
Key Takeaways
There is no clean moment to start. Building around your children, in the gaps, in the energy blocks, in the fragments, is not a compromise. It is a legitimate and real way to build something.
Your children need your presence and your love. They do not need you to abandon your ambitions. In fact, watching you pursue something real is a gift to them, not a debt you owe them.
Three-hour energy blocks, used with full focus and real preparation, are extraordinarily productive. You do not need endless hours. You need the right hours.
Getting help is not weakness, it is strategy. Find the support that allows you to function, whatever form that takes for your life.
The regret of not trying is heavier than the experience of failing. Failure is recoverable. The life unlived is not.
Action Step
Find your three hours this week. Look at your schedule and find one three-hour block where you have energy. Write it in your diary like it is an appointment you cannot cancel. In those three hours, do one thing that moves your dream forward. Research a course. Sketch an idea. Contact someone in your industry. Start today.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
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